


The Time Will Come

by spontaneite



Category: Hikaru no Go
Genre: M/M, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, absolutely no underage, not in body or mind, two bodies one mind
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 19:29:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18723469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spontaneite/pseuds/spontaneite
Summary: There was a time he’d have given up everything to be here today, before Sai vanished, and try to change something. He’d have sacrificed his life for the weight of that desperation. Now, though…





	The Time Will Come

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warnings:** blood, grievous injuries, depictions of grievous injuries, automobile accident.

Hikaru awoke on a quiet, anonymous Tokyo roadside in the middle of the night, the side of his chest in awful pain and his blood rattling in his lungs. He gasped, and dragged himself wordlessly along the rough pavement, unseen, just how he remembered – remembered –

_What?_ He wondered, uncomprehendingly, pulling himself into the glow cast by a streetlight and collapsing against the side of a storefront as every part of him _ached_. His side felt cold and wet. He brought his hand to his jacket and his fingers came away bloody. He remembered that. He remembered this, remembered struggling from the impact of an unwary vehicle and the world going dark as his lung drowned in gore, remembered the pain and the foam of blood over his lips, remembered the metal taste on his tongue-

_I’m still dying?_ He wondered, hazily, mind numb with pain and breathlessness, and hunched over. Someone walked past. He tried to call out for help, but he didn’t have the breath for it. He couldn’t breathe. His jacket was black, his trousers were black – in the dim lighting, it probably wasn’t obvious he was bleeding at all.

_I’m still dying,_ he thought, desperate, and reached out a weak, trembling hand after the late-night traveller who hadn’t given him so much as a second glance. He was just another drunkard, to them. Just another vagrant. They hadn’t even _looked…_

He didn’t want to die. He wasn’t even _forty_ , he had so much left to do. He didn’t want to die, but he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, and the pain was pulling him under again. He was going to die – and no one was even _watching._

With something like despair clutching at his sluggish, labouring heart, Hikaru’s eyes fell shut. The sound of his breathing rattled in his ears as the world, yet again, went utterly dark.

 

\---

 

When he next woke, it wasn’t as hard to breathe, and that was pretty confusing. Hikaru remembered passing out. He remembered passing out for the _second_ time, after the impact from a car had undoubtedly done something fatally horrible to his ribcage and its contents. He hadn’t expected to wake up again at all, much less under the same street lamp he’d expected to die under.

He stared up at it, befuddled, the harsh light it cast vaguely painful to his eyes. Tentatively, he moved a trembling hand to his side, and hissed – _that_ still hurt. He coughed, and something wet and metallic came up into his mouth. He gagged, and then turned to the side to vomit. What he brought up was unsettlingly dark-coloured in the shadows of the city-lights.

Finally, he summoned the mental acuity to put his hand into his pocket, to get his phone – the screen lit up immediately, not even cracked, and the lock screen obediently lit up, the numbers of the time swimming so madly in his vision he couldn’t read them. He swiped up the emergency symbol in the corner, not something he’d had to use before, and waited, shakily, for salvation.

Instead, the phone beeped regretfully at him, returning back to the lock screen. He stared helplessly, and brought it close to his face in hopes of reading it.

No signal. Somehow, there wasn’t even enough signal to call an ambulance. He hadn’t thought that would be _possible_ in the modern day, in the middle of Tokyo.

Hikaru closed his eyes for a moment, body aching and exhausted and breath still wheezing unhealthily with every sucking movement of his chest. He cursed his luck, and then tried to stand. Surprisingly, he didn’t immediately fall over. However, his vision swam horribly, and he wasn’t certain how long his hold on consciousness would last. He looked around, but to his dismay, the street was all but deserted. That’s what he got for walking through the side roads to get home, but it was _not_ helpful. There was no one to talk to, no one to call for help-

He just…had to get to a bigger road. He just had to keep walking home, and he’d find someone. He _would._ It would be fine.

Clinging onto the wall for support, Hikaru managed to pull himself into the tiny side alley that would bring him to where he needed. It was such a short, insignificant shortcut most days. It wasn’t even twenty metres long. Maybe not even _ten_. But it felt like a mile now, and every step was pulling horribly at something in his chest.

Exhaling shakily, Hikaru had the sense to lower himself to the floor before he passed out for the third time.

\---

 

The third time he woke, he felt _suspiciously_ not-bad.

Hikaru blinked once, twice, and three times to clear the blurriness from his eyes, but his vision wasn’t swimming any more. His chest felt a bit tender, but there was none of the shooting pain, and his thoughts were oddly clear. He had a bitch of a headache, but it wasn’t that hard to focus. He sat up, bizarrely alert, and felt quickly at his side. It was cold. Still very wet with blood. But…

He wondered if a lack of pain was a bad sign. Maybe it meant he was too far gone to feel it. Maybe he was in shock. Maybe…

Hikaru looked up, and noticed with a jolt of shock that the sky was getting light. He’d been there for _hours._ Hours, when he was _sure_ he’d been bleeding out, with his lungs logged with blood and no one around to give a damn that he was dying on a random back road. How was he even _alive,_ let alone so bizarrely clear-headed?

He checked his phone, which informed him it was nearly five in the morning, and that there was _still_ no signal. He unlocked it and tried turning the mobile data on and off, tried searching for nearby wi-fi networks, but…nothing. Bewildered, he put it back in his pocket, and then, after taking a deep breath, slipped a hand under his jacket and shirt to feel carefully at his side.

His fingers trailed over half-formed scabs that dislodged from his skin and smeared in the still-wet blood around them. There had been _so much_ blood. But…

The skin felt tender, maybe. Bruised. But it was whole. There wasn’t a _single_ wound.

Hikaru withdrew his hand, thoughts reeling wildly, and looked at his bloody fingertips as if they could reveal the answers to whatever was afoot. “What the fuck,” He whispered, to himself, and his voice was hoarse but not weak. Not choked. Not dying. He coughed and cleared his throat and brought up some red-black phlegm, looking for all the world like a blood clot as he spat it out next to a dumpster, and the evidence was in the blood. He _had_ been injured. Badly. He hadn’t imagined that. But – somehow he was magically healed? It didn’t make any sense.

He shook the helpless confusion away and stood up, facing back along the alley. His apartment wasn’t far from here. He should just – get home. Get home, and clean up, and put on clothes that _weren’t_ caked with blood, and hope the world made more sense then. He could figure it out later, when he hadn’t just been unconscious in an alley for hours and couldn’t taste copper every time he swallowed.

He wiped the blood from around his mouth and wiped it on his trousers, since it wasn’t like a bit more would make a difference, and walked.

 

\---

 

“ _What the fuck,_ ” Hikaru said again, this time less of a whisper and more of an incredulous demand, finding before him not his familiar apartment building but a fucking _construction site._ There was the shell of the familiar building’s shape there, an orderly mess of scaffolding, a billboard cheerfully advertising the apartments being built and advising potential buyers to get in contact with the agency ahead of the completion-

It was _his_ apartment complex being advertised. _His own_ fucking place, the same company, _right there._ Definitely in the right place. He double checked the road signs and it was all right – except-

Since when was that storefront abandoned? It was definitely a KFC last time he looked, he’d gone there a couple times when too drunk or too tired to go around the corner to the cheap ramen shop, but it…just plain wasn’t there, now. And the convenience store next to it looked weirdly fresh and new, the adverts looked weird and _old_ , and the magazines advertised in the next shop over looked weird, and everything was all just so strangely _off_ that he had no idea what to do with it.

Hikaru slumped against the nearest building, head aching and thoughts confused. _Am I hallucinating?_ He wondered, and turned to peer more closely into the dark store, at the advertisements, at the rows of magazines sheathed in the shadows. He looked at advert after advert, reading _offer ends on the first of June!_ on one, _ends on 20 th May!_ on another, each one sending another jolt of confusion through his system.

_It’s July,_ he thought, incredulously, looking at the apparently very out-of-date adverts with suspicion. This store wasn’t, in his experience, negligent enough to leave expired offers up for longer than a day or two, but _months?_ It was incomprehensible. He looked back across the street to the befuddlingly incomplete apartment building, then back across the changed storefronts, and felt a seed of extremely ridiculous suspicion take root in him.

He turned away and walked slowly down the road, stopping at every shop window to look in. Not all of them advertised much in the windows, but they all mainly seemed to have offers expiring in May. No year listed, that he could see, but…

Hesitantly, he withdrew his phone and turned the flashlight function on, shining it at the fine print at the bottom of the page, and saw something he did not like. Something that absolutely could not mean what his stupid brain thought it did. Something that was, assuredly, just a random fluke. _Surely._ Heart in his throat, he turned to the next leaflet, and looked at its fine print too, and then the next, and the next, and then he saw a newspaper sticking out of a nearby bin and – that was kind of…harder to ignore.

The date on the discarded newspaper was May 4th, 2001. The dates on all the adverts were 2001. There was absolutely no reason for false leaflets and newspapers to be all over the place when they were over two decades out of date, but that – that was _impossible,_ surely, people didn’t just get hit by cars and then wake up twenty-four years in the past-

He turned off the phone torch and groaned, bringing his breathing carefully into a forced regularity that ought to help calm him, in theory. He breathed for a couple of minutes until his heart was being less of a frantic bastard and his thoughts weren’t going off in every direction, and that was good enough.

“God, what even is my life.” He said to himself, and then a moment later lamented “I’m too old for random unexpected time travel.” And then he looked at the date on the newspaper, and it started kicking in, started occurring to him, made him think _wait-_

If this was yesterday’s paper, and yesterday was May 4th 2001, then _today…_

Hikaru looked up at the lightening sky with trepidation, and – something _shifted._

_Hikaru woke feeling oddly disorientated, more than the tiredness of too-little sleep after an eventful day should warrant. There was a bizarrely distant headache, like an echo of pain, in his head, something oddly sore about his chest that didn’t respond when he rubbed at it. He scowled, resolving to ignore it, and moved to extract himself from the roomful of futons of event-going Go professionals._

_It was way too early to be awake, but that wasn’t really a bad thing. He needed to get going early, just in case Ogata remembered anything from when he was all drunk and made a fuss, which was the last thing he needed. He was exhausted, but he could sleep on the train. Carefully, he stepped around the lines of sleeping people, footsteps soft, and left the room, Sai trailing silently after him-_

Hikaru jolted on the street, holding a steadying hand against the nearby wall, and wondered what that had-

_Sai offered a quiet good-morning, once they were out in the hallway, but Hikaru still couldn’t respond. It was too quiet around, and someone might easily wake if he spoke-_

Sai?

_Sai looked over the rows of gobans in the event hall with that familiar longing expression, but for whatever reason, he didn’t try to suggest that Hikaru stay and play, didn’t speak, and that was a bit weird but welcome, considering he had to get to the train station soon if he was going to get the early train-_

Hikaru staggered with the weight of it, a scattered trace of a morning from decades ago, a morning that was _now_ and _happening now._ He pulled himself along the street until he found a random bollard to sit on, planting his backside on it as he tried to acclimate to the bizarre experiential effects of witnessing his younger self going about his morning.

That’s what it was, right? That’s what it had to be. Leaving the event facility early to avoid potential repercussions from Sai’s last game – though he’d had no idea at the time that it really was Sai’s _last game-_

_The morning was light in a way that suggested clear weather later on, the skies clear as the sun rose. It would probably be hot today-_

Hikaru tried to concentrate past it, slapping himself lightly on the face as though to instil greater alertness.

Why was he _here?_ Why had he woken up over two decades in the past, instead of dying? Why _today_ , of all days, the still-reigning worst day of his life? Was it some kind of divine intervention, like Sai had been granted to linger as a ghost for a thousand years past his death? If so, what was the _point?_ What was going to happen? Was he meant to be _doing_ something?

…was he even alive, or just another ghost?

Hikaru recalled interacting with the newspaper, and decided that, no, he probably wasn’t a ghost. Probably.

So why…?

He rubbed at his eyes, and then stood to go looking for…something. Some sign, some _thing_ that might shed light on whatever he was doing here. He had no idea what he was searching for. But what else could he do?

 

\---

 

His younger self boarded a train and sat down, kicking his legs out and sprawling out to nap on the journey. Sai was surely there, too, but younger-him wasn’t paying attention to that. The thought of it caused a familiar pang of old regret in him, softened and smoothed by years and years of life and memory.

Meanwhile, Hikaru was picking through his wallet on a street corner, where he’d found a t-shirt vending machine and became suddenly desperate to have at least _one_ un-bloodied article of clothing. A lot of the coins, and especially the notes, had changed over time, but some of them would maybe be accepted by a vending machine. Vending machines probably couldn’t read the minting dates of coins, right?

Thanking small mercies for having broken a larger note for dinner yesterday, he fed coins into the machine, and was delighted to have them accepted. The machine presented him with an exceptionally cheap black t-shirt which, for whatever reason, was decorated with a smiley-face in white. Thankful that it was in a plastic wrapping, he went in search of somewhere with a bathroom he could get changed in.

Quietly, in the strange other-part of his awareness, his younger self fell asleep on the train, and gave him back his concentration.

Tokyo, in the end, was a city, and had plenty of 24-hour businesses when you got to the right roads. He wavered over a few coffee shops and one manga café, and in the end selected the coffee shop that looked least likely to have CCTV cameras. Although – it was 2001, were cameras even as omnipresent now as they were in the future? He had no idea. Either way, he really needed to wash up.

Once inside, the one person who seemed to be on staff apologetically informed him that the restroom facilities were only available to paying customers. Since Hikaru didn’t want to try his future-money against a real person, he accepted that and left, eyeing the other establishments with consternation.

In the end, he went looking for a public toilet.

It stank unpleasantly when he found it, and seemed mostly bereft of things like toilet paper, but he was mainly there to wash up a bit and change shirts, so that was okay. Hikaru peeled off his suit jacket, grimacing at the noise of its fabric tearing the blood-bonds it had to the undershirt. He sent a modest spray of dried blood dust onto the already-unpleasant flooring, and set the jacket carefully aside to inspect his shirt.

It had been blue, once. It definitely wasn’t now. The side where he’d been injured seemed a bit damaged, the fabric lightly scored, and there was an enormous bloodstain reaching from half-way around his chest to half-way around his back. Only the edges were approaching dry. Carefully, Hikaru undid the buttons and took that off too. He’d never been shirtless in a public toilet before, but he supposed there was a first time for everything.

The mirror over the sinks was cracked but not shattered, and was perfectly sufficient to inspect the state of his side. It looked…gory. Absolutely caked with blood, which had thickened all-over into a sludgy mess halfway between liquid and scab, interrupted only by the clumsy lines his fingers had shoved through it earlier. He had no idea what the state of his skin underneath was.

After some searching, Hikaru retrieved a small cache of clean toilet paper from the last cubicle, wetted it in the sink, and started clearing the mess on his side away.

Underneath, the skin was whole and unbroken. There was a horrible bruise there, black and purple over his side, but no sign of an open wound at all. It was patently impossible, but…so was time travel. Hikaru sighed, and used a combination of the tissues and the clean section of his shirt to wash and dry his skin. The sink was absolutely crimson with blood.

In the end, his torso was as clean as it could reasonably get in a public toilet with no replacement available for the bloody trousers, so Hikaru removed the 500-yen t-shirt from its plastic wrapping, put it on, and felt immediately far less disgusting. He stared at his reflection in the mirror as he tried to wash the worst of the sink-blood away, noting the bags under his eyes and the faint unhealthy pallor to his skin, and wondered if he should worry about the consequences of surviving certain death.

Eventually, Hikaru bundled up his bloody clothes and took them outside to find a bin, and then he was done with them, and had no more idea of what he should be doing than before.

Directionless, he wandered until he found a bench, and then sat there, staring at the sky. He was starting to feel vaguely hungry, his stomach apparently making itself known now that there didn’t seem to be any danger of death. He felt tired, of course, since he’d never had an opportunity to actually sleep last night, rather than just passing out for several hours failing to die. He felt hungry and tired, and he wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t sure what to do about any of that.

Somewhere, he was sleeping on a train, unaware of the sorrow the day would bring. Somewhere, Sai was sitting beside him, unaware that no one would be watching when he disappeared.

“What the hell did I do to deserve being shunted back to _today?”_ He asked the sky, without expecting any particular response.

He stared at the sky, and nothing changed.

 

\---

 

A while later, a thought occurred to him. A flash of memory, of thought, half-grasped between the blood and burbling breath and a world going dark at the edges.

“Aw shit.” He said to himself, out loud, like an absolute madman. “That’ll have done it, if someone was listening.”

He couldn’t be certain. But he thought, maybe, that before the first time he’d passed out in the future, he’d thought of Sai. Something like: _maybe I’ll see Sai soon._ Or possibly: _I guess I always wanted to see Sai again._

Maybe the gods weren’t done screwing around with Sai, or the people his life had touched.

“Maybe that’s it.” He sighed, and drew some stares from passers-by. It was Golden Week, so there wasn’t much of a commute going on, but it’s not like everyone could get time off in that week, or society would collapse. Hence, the streets were far from abandoned now.

Maybe that was it. Maybe he was here to see Sai again. Maybe that was why he was here.

He considered it, and watched a wispy cloud spread across the blue of the sky.

Sai’s disappearance was an old scar, now. With the passage of years, it had come to hurt less, and the weight of his regrets had worn thinner and lighter with every passing month. He’d talked about Sai, to the people who cared about it, who cared about Hikaru. He’d shared the games, still immortalised in his memory, and with the inexorable advance of time, they had become good memories. The games, the conversations, all the time he’d shared with Sai – they were memories to be treasured, and cherished, and they weren’t so painful anymore. It wasn’t as though a person could ever really completely move past a loss like that, but…

It hadn’t really hurt for a long time. There was a time he’d have given up everything to be here today, before Sai vanished, and try to change something. He’d have sacrificed his life for the weight of that desperation. Now…

He watched the cloud, and pondered.

It was a nice thought. He’d like to see Sai again. Of course he’d like to see Sai again. If that was why he was here, if that was why he hadn’t died…it was a nice thought. Maybe he was only here on borrowed time. Maybe he was only here for the sake of a last wish, and then he’d be gone. He wasn’t sure, but at this point, there was little to be gained by waiting.

He stood, and considered where he ought to go from here.

 

\---

 

Hikaru had never slept especially well on trains, no matter how tired he was, so it wasn’t surprising that he kept waking up. He shifted restlessly, shuffled his feet, got up and blinked a few times, glanced to his side to see if Sai was doing anything, and went back to sleep about a dozen different times over the course of the journey. Whenever he managed to doze off, his dreams were…weird.

Once, he woke up convinced there was blood all over his hands, that he’d just been cleaning it off. He looked at his fingers in bleary-eyed confusion before going back to sleep again. He dreamed of cloud-watching, of taking a different train, of knocking his side against something and sending a horrible pain through the bruise there – but he didn’t have any bruise on his side, so that was stupid. In the end Hikaru conceded to the inevitable and allowed himself to wake fully, still exceptionally drowsy from the heat and lack of proper sleep.

He looked over at Sai, who was staring at his hand, oddly pensive-

_God, it had been so long since he’d seen Sai. He’d not considered that he’d see him again any time soon-_

Hikaru blinked, and shook his head with dizzy confusion.

Sai noticed, and looked back at him. His hand disappeared back into his sleeve. “Hikaru?” He asked, voice still unusually subdued. Hikaru wasn’t sure what was up with him. He’d been acting all depressed for days, even when he’d got to play Ogata last night. “Is something the matter?”

He made a dismissive noise. “Nah. Just weird dreams.” He said, and sighed. “We’ll be back soon anyway, and I can have a proper sleep.”

Sai opened his mouth, then hesitated strangely. In the end, he didn’t say anything. He was acting so _weird._ Hikaru turned away. If Sai wanted to say something, then he _could_ -

_It was strange to see, how determined he’d been to ignore the signs. How convinced he’d been that things would remain as they were, that people couldn’t just suddenly disappear one day, that people you loved would always stay-_

Hikaru swayed a little in his seat and held a hand to his forehead in confusion. Was he sick? Was he still asleep?

“Must be more tired than I thought.” He muttered to himself, and for the rest of the short journey, ignored the weird dreamlike fragments of – thinking, standing on a train, getting off a train, stepping outside a platform to wait-

_Whatever the connection was seemed to be getting stronger. Maybe because they were getting closer. It wouldn’t be long now-_

Hikaru closed his eyes to try to make the weird-waking dreams stop, but they didn’t. For the rest of the train ride, he endured the strange snippets of experience, like he was in another place, waiting, waiting, waiting-

Finally, they arrived. He stumbled when he stood, mind dizzy and distracted, and had to wave off Sai’s concern when he roused from his quietude to ask after his wellbeing. He stepped off the train at his station, where he could change trains and then get off at a station less than ten minutes from his house. He couldn’t _wait_ to reunite with his bed and sleep off whatever weird sleep-deprived state he’d ended up in.

He stepped off the train-

_Waiting_

Stepped falteringly along the platform, head swimming, Sai growing increasingly worried beside him-

_They’re nearly here_

He was going to have to sit down, find a bench, he could barely think. Fuck, this couldn’t just be him being tired, it was suddenly so much worse, he had to be sick, or something. Hikaru staggered off the platform, looking around for somewhere he could rest for a minute, but then-

Then-

_Oh!_

There was a sensation like double-vision, like looking at himself, like seeing himself and Sai both, emerging from the platform, like he was seeing himself from _outside_ his body-

_It’s been so long,_ a thought that wasn’t his said, almost longingly, with a torrent of old emotion, old nostalgia, old regrets surging out as though from a burst dam. _I forgot what he looked like! Not completely, of course, but – oh,_ look _at him._

Old love, old hurt, a strange starburst of gratitude and joy. Hikaru swayed and would have fallen over if Sai hadn’t supported him, now thoroughly flustered about whatever was happening to him. He was talking. Saying something. Hikaru could barely hear the words, let alone understand-

_….ah, whoops,_

He looked over, mind caught horribly between two sets of visual input, and-

He looked over, and met the eyes of someone who looked very, very much like himself.

 

\---

 

“Shit.” Hikaru cursed, quietly, as the dual-consciousness thing passing between them immediately built into a screaming, overwhelming feedback loop of stimuli and confusion the second their eyes met. It was almost impossible to think past, and he could _see –_ could _feel_ – that it was harder on his younger self than him. Small-Hikaru had practically fallen over, Sai was holding him up and flailing frantically, the poor man, but he couldn’t really pay any more attention to that than anything else-

What was he meant to do? It was getting worse with their closeness, so – should he just – leave? Go away? Let himself disappear, or whatever was going to happen now?

It was probably sensible. It was…probably what he should do. But…

His eyes remained utterly, inexorably fixed on those of his counterpart, and he couldn’t budge an inch. He didn’t think he could have moved if he tried. All the while, the mess of confusion between them grew, and grew, and spiralled out of control-

Sai finally looked over, finally following small-Hikaru’s eyes, and froze at the sight of him.

“…Hikaru?” He asked, utterly bewildered, and Hikaru heard it-

_Hikaru?_

-through two sets of ears, two minds, two bodies-

They were too close, too _far_ , their minds were ripping apart from the proximity but too distant to heal, it was too far, too far, it was going to _kill_ them-

Somehow, Hikaru stepped towards him / stepped towards him, pulling Sai with him

“Hikaru, is that-“ / Hikaru, is that / he started, started, voice torn between them, broken up, scattered fragments of comprehension that wouldn’t integrate correctly,

Another step, another step / another stumble closer / still too far, too _far._

“Help,” One of them gasped, maybe both of them, and they couldn’t have known whose lips the word passed, if it was both, if it was neither, there was no way of knowing. “Sai, help – help me _move-_ “

“I don’t / “I don’t understand,” / Sai’s helpless voice filtered through their ears, nearer and further, closer and farther away, but he helped. He helped, he helped, he helped-

Hikaru reached out a trembling hand and Hikaru reached out to grasp it like a lifeline, and Hikaru and Hikaru shuddered and trembled as the unravelling pieces of them reached out and bound together, rushed together, remaking themselves in an overwhelming second of change and confusion-

They blinked, and were looking at each other, that double-vision still there, hand in hand. There were two sets of eyes seeing the world, two sets of ears hearing it, two bodies standing and two hearts beating and two people living and breathing in some random train station in the middle of Tokyo in 2001-

But there was only one mind.

Tentatively, Hikaru withdrew his hand. Both of them withdrew at once, and it was a weird sensation, two separate sets of movement, each processed individually but – linked.

“What the hell,” They said, and the words came in utterly identical timing and cadence from two separate mouths. They tried to look down, and both of them did it, the double-vision splitting into one adult man in bloody trousers and a cheap t-shirt, and a fourteen-year-old boy in the same clothes he’d slept in. “What the hell,” They said again, helplessly, and the only difference between the words was which throat they emerged from.

“…Hikaru?” Sai asked, in a small and overwhelmed voice, and they both turned to look at him, their dual vision filling with the sight of him, so familiar, so dearly-missed. “What – what is happening? Are you-“ He looked at one of them, and it took looking down again to distinguish that it was the older body he was looking at.

“Um.” They said, as quietly as they could, aware that people were starting to look at them weirdly and that they were in the middle of a train station. “…help me outside? Please?”

Sai stared at – him, older Hikaru, then looked to other him, and then between them, eyes wide and baffled and plainly anxious and his back stiff with tension. But, after a moment, he reached out. One hand for each of them.

It took a great deal of effort, when they reached out, to reach for separate hands, instead of both reaching for one. They didn’t entirely succeed. One of them took the right hand, but the other was still reaching for it, and trying to move it for the other hand instead resulted in the other one moving too, and it was so _difficult_ to move them separately-

Sai, hesitantly, reached out to take the stray hand himself, and pulled gently at them. Helpless, and half falling over with every step, the two bodies of Hikaru allowed themselves to be let gently out towards the door.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Notes:** one of the most indulgent story ideas I’ve ever had, and I like it a lot. I wrote it last year sometime, around November, maybe. Given it’s all about 5th May stuff it seems an appropriate release for today. Happy Hikago Day, everyone!
> 
> **Story stuff:** this story mainly exists as a concept so I can fuck about and also have a plausible scenario for chill, mostly un-angsty hikasai. Absolutely no underage herein. Details in this story are subject to change, e.g. Hikaru’s age. Also this probably won’t update for ages. Sorry!
> 
> This story is named after the first line of one of my favourite poems: Love after love, by Derek Walcott, shown here.
> 
> _The time will come_  
>  when, with elation  
> you will greet yourself arriving  
> at your own door, in your own mirror  
> and each will smile at the other’s welcome, 
> 
> _and say, sit here. Eat._  
>  You will love again the stranger who was your self.  
> Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart  
> to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 
> 
> _all your life, whom you ignored_  
>  for another, who knows you by heart.  
> Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 
> 
> _the photographs, the desperate notes,_  
>  peel your own image from the mirror.  
> Sit. Feast on your life. 


End file.
